There's a 160-year-old economic principle that explains exactly where AI is headed. In Victorian Britain, new steam engines slashed the coal needed per unit of work. Many expected coal consumption to fall. It soared. Economist William Stanley Jevons noticed this and realized that making a resource more efficient often increases, rather than decreases, how much of it society uses. Cheaper steam power made new factories economically viable. New heating systems. New locomotives. Entire categories of activity that were uneconomical when coal was expensive suddenly made sense. We have seen this pattern repeat with electricity, with ATMs (which cut the cost of branches and contributed to more branches overall), and with computing, where cheaper processing has led to an explosion in total compute. Now intelligence is on the same curve. AI is pushing the cost of thinking, analyzing, and creating toward zero in more and more domains. Everyone's asking how to build a $1B company with one person, but 1:1 substitution is almost never how abundance plays out. When thinking becomes cheap, we don't conserve it. We keep discovering more problems worth solving and more businesses that only make sense once human brainpower is no longer the bottleneck. The ceiling is moving up and out of sight. What are you going to build in a world where marginal intelligence is nearly free?
I sat yesterday with an investor relations leader who in 20 minutes became a data scientist using cursor - I think this dynamic is going to be more interesting than "AI will take our jobs"
The challenge is that it is marginal intelligence which is averaged potentially without commercially valuable insight.
I think of AI as a great confidence booster for startups. Things that seemed impossible before now look possible because of this intelligence and knowledge on tap.
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What's the first "newly viable" business or project you've seen emerge because AI made something economically feasible that wasn't before?